We asked several Women Security Leaders to tell us what drew them into the profession, along with their thoughts on continued diversification of the industry.
The Unofficial Law of Endpoint Security Proportionality: The security measures taken to protect an employee’s endpoint are proportionate to the proximity of the employee to the company’s most valued assets. Or, put in simpler terms, the more closely an employee works with a company’s crown jewels, the more essential it is to virtually eliminate the possibility of an endpoint security breach.
GroupSense’s director of intelligence operations Bryce Webster-Jacobsen outlines the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification’s Impact on Defense Contractors.
In order to combat cybersecurity threats, the Biden administration and state governors across the country should immediately work to foster deeper relationships with the private sector. Tech and government certainly don’t always get along, but the threats we face now require a national effort that would rival the Space Race of the 1960s. This can be done through state and federal governments offering financial incentives to businesses that prioritize the development and integration of cybersecurity measures, amplified communication from the government concerning the importance of cybersecurity, as well as the potential bolstering of compliance standards to minimize threats and the negative impact of breaches.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity, while often overhyped, is not a new concept. Hackers have included countermeasures in malware since its inception to detect runtime environments or sense detection attempts. Early actions were primitive compared to what we know today, but they laid the groundwork for more critical thought about adaptive and evasive technologies and sophisticated situational awareness. This lethal combination of research and deep targeting is likely the future of malware as adversaries attempt to outsmart the companies and researchers trying to thwart them.
With the inception of privacy regulatory laws and associated penalties, it has become mandatory for organizations to take necessary steps in establishing and implementing a strong privacy risk management framework. Inadequate, or the lack of, a risk management framework may present numerous organizational risks.
Education is particularly attractive to criminals because of the vast amount of valuable data it holds: student and staff information, supplier information, alumni databases, and research data - so, as security experts, what’s to be done to help schools secure their endpoint devices?
Now more than ever before, the small business sector is beginning to prioritize cybersecurity and cyber liability insurance to mitigate potential crippling financial risk, which is setting the stage for a major trend moving forward: the merging of cybersecurity technology and insurance to mitigate insurer’s risk and provide the best overall coverage for small businesses.
Ransomware – a cyberattack in which attackers hijack computer systems and demand payment to release them – has skyrocketed from a relative rarity a few years ago to the single biggest type of cybercrime today. And there is no end in sight to its growth trajectory. Last year, 2,354 American government entities, healthcare organizations and schools were the victims of ransomware attacks. The average ransomware payout swelled to $178,000 in the first half of 2020, up from $112,000 a year ago, according to ransomware incident response firm Coveware, and few clandestine culprits were caught.
Now that we’ve learned this dependency on the cloud will continue to grow, there are new challenges that organizations have to solve in the year ahead – starting with making these cloud infrastructures more secure. To do this, organizations must reroute the security perimeter to focus on identity. While cloud-based identity can be a complicated concept for a number of reasons, there are a few simple steps organizations can take to evolve their identity access management (IAM) strategies. By moving beyond “effective permissions,” they should instead focus on threats and risks, following a cloud IAM lifecycle approach.